Skip to footer

Organic meal kits help out frazzled home cooks

Local and organic meal kits that are delivered to your door are a growing trend among consumers who care about where their food comes from and like to cook but are pressed for time to actually plan and prepare a meal from fresh ingredients.

|
Courtesy of Blue Apron
A two-servings meal kit

For home cooks who would describe their culinary skills somewhere between heating up premade food and figuring out what to do with all that bok choy from the weekly local farm share, here’s some good news: You can order local and organic meal kits to be delivered to your door.

Here’s how it works: Go online, choose from a bevy of recipes (priced at $8 to about $12.50 per plate), select a delivery date, and then wait for the boxes filled with all of the ingredients – down to the measured-out spices – to arrive at your house. Then just pull out your chef tools and you’ll have a homemade meal in about 30 minutes. 

It’s a growing trend among consumers who care about where their food comes from and like to cook but are pressed for time to actually plan and prepare a meal from fresh ingredients. There are a handful of national meal-kit services to help. Two of them, Blue Apron and HelloFresh, each ship more than a million meals across the United States per month. Now more local and certified organic delivery services from Boston to Atlanta to Los Angeles are taking a page from those cookbooks – and everyone from Millennial foodies to exasperated parents of picky eaters to empty nesters are signing up.

“We’re sort of helping people reinvent their Sunday through Thursday experience,” says Seth Goldman, chief executive officer of HelloFresh, a European company that expanded to the US a few years ago. “And we’re going to make sure that it’s easy and nutritionally sound and delicious.”

Laurel Valchuis, owner of the Boston-area al FreshCo, says she started her service to boost local farms. In her former job as an agricultural consultant she was dismayed that community-supported agriculture shares and farmers markets could be cost prohibitive for some and hard to get to for others. She also said she saw farmers struggling to find customers. “Meal kits were the answer,” she says. “People appreciate the convenience and sourcing.”

Phil Lempert, author of the blog “Supermarket Guru,” says Millennials are a key driver of the trend, not only because they are concerned about the environment, but also because “preparing your own food is cheaper than eating out every night,” he says.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Organic meal kits help out frazzled home cooks
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Food/2015/0526/Organic-meal-kits-help-out-frazzled-home-cooks
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe